Musical Notes

I was given my Bron Mandoline, a year after I moved into this little apartment. An online reviewer describes this glittering amalgam of steel blade encased in more steel as "the Cadillac of the kitchen". Invented by Jean Bron, in Switzerland, about 1950, it does have the strange, dated and outsized looks of another time. A Bron, sitting inanimate on the kitchen counter, just about shouts out that one is not merely prepping a meal but constructing it and I had wanted one for a long time to help me make beautiful dishes. Now there are many imitators and updated incarnations but none slices and cuts quite like this one which positively demands one's attention when finely slicing precision rounds for a Confit Byaldi, or delicate leaves of potato for a pavé or symmetrical slivers for shoestring fries.

One of the great results of The South Beach Diet is that one thinks before one eats, almost every bite. And I do a lot more thinking before I cook. I am also more careful in my food preparation and more inventive too. I have scoured my cookbook collection to concoct new variations of favorite recipes using the allowable and ever increasing ingredient list. I have not yet used any of the many recipes from the book and the weight loss is very real. More than anything I feel healthier and more alert, but it is also a great pleasure to be getting the mandoline out, to prep manually without the use of a food processor and to subsequently dine on dishes with improved texture and that are even more of a pleasure to the eye.

A Pound of Flesh

I had my fiftieth birthday in January. Treated to a bash at Woolgrower's Basque Restaurant in Bakersfield with all the usual courses and the owner in attendance, it was a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Diaz and their son Matt. The pickled tongue was as delicious as usual and the fried chicken, one of the main courses, was about as good as the dish can get. At the after party, Sue Diaz, in collusion with my mother who was unable to attend, had baked a birthday cake of the kind I loved as a child and duplicated its flavor almost exactly, which we enjoyed a la mode. Many photographs were taken that day and many of them included me. I'm not one to fret about my looks or the odd ten pound excess from time to time, but I could tell that I was beyond a little overweight. There it was, the visual evidence, and I suspected that the intermittently high blood pressure and general malaise I had been experiencing for a while needed attending to.

Sue Diaz is recently recovered from cancer, and while on chemotherapy, she and her husband dieted to please the doctor using Agatston's popular South Beach Diet. She often had the cookbooks open in the kitchen to a recipe she was making. Browsing through the book the food sounded normal and delicious and I thought that would be the diet to try if I felt the need. About three weeks ago I picked up the book and read it. Concisely written by a cardiologist, I liked the whole premise, that weight loss was a by-product of eating healthily. I also realized that since I could cook it might be possible to make interesting dishes and hone cooking skills. The diet works in three phases the first giving the fastest loss and therefore the most ascetic, the second slowing the speed in Phase One, and the third is maintenance of the target weight. Each phase comes with a list of yes foods and no foods and basically each adds some of those that were absent in the previous phase. Phase One lasts two weeks and disallows all starches, sugars and alcohol and severely limits fruit intake and some high sugar vegetables. In the first two weeks I lost 12 pounds and am now into a third week to get less of a love handle on things before adding a little starch, whole grains, fruit and red wine. I have had no cravings and feel so much better and have recorded a loss of some 15 pounds. My blood pressure is back to normal and my head is clear, no more heartburn or digestive problems, and I suspect my blood sugar average is much better.

Interestingly enough I have not made a single recipe from The SBD cookbooks, and I will explain why in the upcoming posts but I have stuck rigidly to the allowed foods list and really trying out many of the leafy green vegetables I have neglected over the years such as chard and kale. One of my favorite lunches has been blanched brussels sprouts in a little olive oil and garlic with low sodium, sliced, herbed turkey with it. I am a huge fan of this compact little green ball and it's been a joy to get to know their subtle and complex flavors better.

Daube is a Fancy Name for Stew

After the usual Christmas victuals, the quiet, let's-hide-out home life kicks in without general family obligations. So it's a time for comfort food. A favorite cookbook over this season is Paula Wolfert's, The Cooking of Southwest France, a book that you need if you cook and expect cold weather. I made a Daube of Oxtail to Wolfert's recipe. I have to say that this is one of The sublime dishes. It's clarity, depth and sheer richness are unbeatable. A little goes a very long way when paired with fat buttered flat egg noodles and a braised lettuce salad on the side. Unusually, I didn't mess with the recipe much except to substitute veal stock for the pig's foot which I couldn't easily find. You might ask, why? Living in a town full of carnicerias and ethnic markets that you mention frequently, why couldn't you find the ingredients? The answer is simple: Los Angeles is a hard place to navigate quickly even when you know it well due to the distances involved in this vast city and also the abundance of hidden sources that really always need to be personally indexed. So far I haven't been able to devote time to this pursuit. Fun thing is that "stew" is an umbrella name for a multitude of dishes usually thought of as some nondescript wet mass, often with the inaccurate adjective "Irish" attached. This stew, a daube, was one of the greatest I have ever cooked. There was very little extra liquid but that fully flavorful and a knockabout to the meaty bones. Truth is, as I shared the dish with others, in thanks, they put me on track to sainthood as a result!

Feasting Aplenty

In recent weeks I've cooked many a feast and partaken of a couple, too. Before I get all medieval like, I should say that two of those I cooked were no-brainers: A huge rib roast where timing, temperature and the look of the roast toward the end were the most important factors, and a pork loin with prunes, likewise a dish I cook with little mental effort as the creaminess of the wine soaked reconstituted prunes braised with the meat and its rich juices provide so much of the action to those who taste it for the first time. These two dishes were made for Christmas Day and were accompanied by Erin's delicious Roast Turkey up in Old Bakersfield.

I was given a great book for Christmas, Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman who co-authors all of Thomas Keller's (French Laundry, Bouchon, Per Se) cookbooks. It will become a favorite of mine because it is complete and thorough and highly lucid, with recipes both simple and complex and every section yields a goldmine of tricks. It includes a good source guide for those hard to find curing salts and more exotic ingredients. Charcuterie is the preservation of meats and offal, mainly from pork and fowl, which the French particularly have elevated to high art. Way beyond sausage and salami, bacon or rilettes, there are a myriad of very elaborate and complex delicacies that simultaneously appear to hide and reveal the character of the host meats. Like all art, charcuterie aims to distil the essence of its subject's parts into something new and then reminding us continually of the original. The Romans probably invented charcuterie, pork being their most prized meat and its production and sale was governed under law. This book travels the world with such favorites as lemon confit from North Africa, and duck prosciutto from who knows where? At the same time, rather punningly, I received the new huge Bacon book (Francis, that is) , which I had been jonesing for, and which contains plenty of flesh including a hog or two. It accompanied the Palazzo Reale retrospective recently which will hit New York's Metropolitan Museum pretty soon on its way from London. Anyone want to fly me out? 

One last bookish comment: I also received Molecular Gastronomy, by Hervé This which approaches cooking from a mainly scientific viewpoint and contains fascinating illuminations on the whys and wherefores of how a dish works. I am also amazed at the economy with which Monsieur This writes, since every essay seems to be the same short length, like so many molecules making up a burst of flavor.

Blessed

As an American raised in Britain, Thanksgiving was something we were able to participate in but rarely in a social sense outside of family. For me now in Los Angeles, it is a marvelous thing to enjoy community and family in that month before Christmas and to reflect on the great joy of being an American, with all the pluses and minuses that we contemporary Americans carry each day. I was able to enjoy an earnest and warm celebration this past Thanksgiving with my adopted family in Bakersfield.

Christmas is here now. For me and many others Christmas is a religious celebration of the birth of Christ. This is what causes me to celebrate and share my own joy and happiness at this time, mindful of the fact that many of my friends are celebrating different religious holidays around this time. So many of their beliefs are different to mine and some friends have no religious beliefs at all. In a spirit of tolerance and respect for those of other credes, I must also be frank about why I am celebrating and why I like to share that internal joy. This is not a secular holiday for me.

I was interested to read in Nathaniel Philbrick's book on The Mayflower that the common or garden Turkey had been introduced, bred and circulated throughout Europe since the 1500s by the Spanish and that The Mayflower's passengers were more than familiar with it as a feasting dish in England when they got sort of settled and had the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth in 1621. Apparently the tastiest birds on that occasion were Mallards and other ducks. What surprised the Pilgrims most was the large size of wild Turkeys (which were present at the feast and provided by the indigenous Pokanokets) as they had already been bred smaller and neater since their appearance in Europe. These settlers introduced stews and hotpots to the Pokanokets who greatly savored them, with all manner of meats and fish therein. Please, who wouldn't enjoy a rich, slow cooked Daube of local meats?

Whatever your belief or non belief I wish you all Love, Peace and Prosperity this Christmas, and also for the new year of 2009. I share and celebrate my "holiday" love only for the already mentioned reasons. Come sup with me sometime to celebrate our friendship. Until then, I bless you and your family.

Salt and Pepper

My barber of eight years, Rafael, told me at the last cut that my hair is almost purely white. No more passing it off as salt and pepper even though people say it looks blondish in the right light. My white hair was totally appropriate at my friend Jeff's impromptu 25th birthday celebration this week on account of the surroundings.

A group of four, we spent an evening at Musso and Frank's before Jeff left for New York. He, Me, Pete and Matt had a lovely time. Jeff, a devoted vegetarian, dined on Macaroni and Cheese, Pete had the Salmon with Asparagus (so beautifully green it provoked a similarly colored envy). Matt had Deep Fried Shrimp with Fries and I had the Grilled Pork Chops. Man, are their martinis good? 'Continental Cuisine' at its fuzzy best. Jeff usually gets Charlie Chaplin's old booth but we waited this time for his favorite waiter. Said truly excellent waiter pointed out the location of The Back Room, orifginally leased from the Vogue Theater next door and which is now accessed from the parking lot and now in disuse since they lost their lease to it in 1954. That was where Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Chandler used to pass out. The bar from there was transplanted without the hood to the large dining room when the lease was lost though the original wallpaper remains apparently. Musso's is reputedly the oldest restaurant in Hollywood since 1919 and it keeps that clubby flavor. Its last makeover was in the early nineteen fifties. On another occasion we were seated in the large dining room and some starlet was seated next to us while her boyfriend made a beeline for the bathroom. She said, "I hear the food isn't so good here". I said, "It's not just about the food, and the food is fine." Needless to say they moved. I love Musso's, you don't just go there for the food, which at the very least is better than any Stuart Anderson's, you also go for the life, the whole kit 'n kaboodle.

A Guilty pleasure this week was lunch at El Cholo Cafe, in Pasadena, an offshoot of the original LA fixture founded 1923. We went for a Margarita lunch with blue corn enchiladas on the side (my lunch partner will remain nameless). I sobered up for an hour afterward by the pool while my friend workhollicked. Believe it or not it was a productive lunch. Sadly, a hired hand intimated that business was not good at the moment. I'm assuming he was talking about localized events that have resulted from the ridiculous overspill of the sandbox we Americans have all stood by and allowed any kid to build castles in during the last twenty years. One wonders if the nod and the wink by Daddy for some kind of baillout wasn't given years ago. These are mostly clever people up there, you know.  I was talking like Maureen Dowd about this particular parallel twenty years ago.

Tonight it's Loin of Pork with Prunes. This is based on an antique Roman recipe by Apicius. The pork, salted and peppered and with fresh onion and garlic, dried prunes, is roasted with chicken stock and a little white wine. Soft Potatoes and Young Broccoli will accompany. Plate, knife and fork, will present it. Salt and pepper, without allusion, will be served on the side. 

Last of Summer?

Marissa Roth gave a small dinner party last night which started poolside with plump green olives and sliced salami, creamy pastry cheese twists and a very potable chilled Riesling. When called to table we found a huge platter laden with fresh buffalo mozzarella, baby arugula, avocado, capers and a mild vinaigrette. Food maven, LA Times columnist and author Russ Parsons, brought along two varieties of Brandywine heirloom tomatoes grown in his Long Beach garden which Marissa substituted for her tiny heirlooms, and they were plump flavorful and lusciously tasty. After we had laid waste to that she served up wild organic salmon poached in orange juice with fresh dill, steamed french green beans with plenty of parsley, and deliciously crisp pan roasted fingerling potatoes. A French Muscadet and a dry, buttery Carneros Clos Du Val Chardonnay, which Russ also supplied, complemented it all with plenty of sparkling mineral water. If that wasn't enough we went back poolside to taste fresh nectarine gelato. All the ingredients were from her local South Pasadena farmer's market, including the gelato by Carmela Ice Cream who sells online and at the Hollywood and South Pasadena farmer's markets, with the exception of Russ's homegrown tomatoes and the salmon which Marissa caught herself at Bristol farms. It was a superb dinner.

We talked a bit about whether summer was over or not, a bit about food as Russ is a goldmine of information on resources and the way things are in foodland, and we talked about Bakersfield and Fresno and their anomalies. For all that hard work Marissa looked remarkably relaxed and glowed throughout the evening like the bloom on one of the sweet nectarines she garnished the gelato with. Perhaps this cool summer will linger on and I for one won't mind. Next week fall will officially be here for me as I harvest my Bakersfield Chardonnays and start to turn them into wine. I tasted them last week and they were intensely sweet but I bought a refractometer so as to measure the brix before I start getting sharp with the shears.